Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development. These are my personal views and not those of CILIP or any other organisation I may be associated with.

August 29, 2006

Flickr adds Geo tagging. Well, not exactly.

The FlickrBlog is alive with the exciting news that you can now geotag your photographs! Well, that would be great and wonderful, except that.... IT DOESN'T WORK.

Well, now I've got that rant out of my system, let me be a little fairer. It doesn't work for the UK. At least not properly, and not even close to properly. The idea is great - you go to your Organizer section, pull up the map, focus on the place the picture was taken and tag it. Oddly enough in order to zoom in you click the + symbol which is at the bottom, rather than top, which is going to be an irritant since everything else that I use has it the other way around.

Secondly the resolution is poor. Thirdly, if you're trying to get anywhere close in the UK just forget it, because you won't. Fourth, if you try and find a location in the UK, it'll find it for you, but then when you click again, it disappears on you!

I'm guessing that it works fine in the US. Lots of folks seem to like it and it's getting favorable responses. For the UK though I have to say it's very poor and needs a lot of work.

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Yes - deeply disappointing. What is it about outfits like Flickr and Google (who you rightly lambast for their awful Google books launch)? My guess is that it's the age old problem of the marketing/sales people living on a different planet to the engineers. (I'm neither, so am allowed to say this.) The marketing types reason for living is to tell the world about stuff before it's ready. They don't know why they do this, they just do. Dilbert is, of course, always encountering this problem, not to mention the pointy haired boss.

Google and Flickr need to learn from the Japanese. All senior people in Japanese engineering companies (including their marketing people) are engineers. Plus, there's no such thing as an 'accountant' in Japan. Nuff said?